This year, I'm going to join our American cousins and celebrate Thanksgiving the old fashioned way. By which I mean I'm going to invite all my neighbours round for an enormous feast, kill them all and then take their land.

"In the later years of Persia, thieves had to deal with horrifying punishments. Anyone caught stealing or harassing a rider on the roads of the empire was sentenced to death—by being torn in half.[4]

The executioners would pull the tops of two trees as close to one another as they could and tie them together. They would drag the convict over and tie one leg to the top of each tree. Then they would cut the cord holding the trees together."